Shuteye for the Timebroker (19 page)

He had been walking for half an hour. On his right side, the familiar city stretched away, full of the people and places he had known all his life. On his left, the wall loomed, overpoweringly huge, yet in a strange way comforting. What lay beyond it?

After another quarter of an hour, he reached the tower. He saw from its angle of curvature that it would have taken a dozen men to circle its base with outstretched hands touching. From where he stood, nearly against the wall, he could not see beyond it. He circled to the far side. There he found the gate.

It was an arched opening in the wall that reached as high as the towers. (There were two, he saw now.) Around the arch were carved flowers and beasts, people and castles, stars and trees, all glazed in bright colors. The opening itself was filled with a white mottled haze, like a pearly fog populated by spirits and shadows, all astir with quick movements.

Moreton looked over his shoulder. The city of his adulthood stood there as ever, safe and secure, but holding nothing he could grasp anymore.

Six steps took him through the gate.

* * *

There were people everywhere.

Moreton could barely take it all in.

On its far side, the gate was flanked by mustached guards clad in paneled leather skirts and bronze cuirasses, bearing tall staves tipped with elaborate blades. Ahead stretched a broad way thronged with figures dressed in myriad styles: embroidered robes; billowing silky trousers and vests over bare chests; painted skin and loin wraps; polished armor that clanked.

Stuccoed and wooden structures lined the wide street, threaded with alleys and interspersed with formal courtyards.

Moreton looked backward, through the gate. The road stretched away on the far side, a taut thread pulled tight across a shimmering alkaline desert.

Rough hands gripped both his biceps. The guards on either side had fallen roughly upon him.

One spoke. “Your right of entry,” the guard said, making it neither question nor declaration. The words lay as unanswerable as a stone between them.

Moreton found no speech with which to reply. The guards tightened their grip.

“Wait! I know this man.”

A bent, shuffling form approached. It appeared to be an old man wearing a white robe and turned-up red slippers with inset mirror-shards. At his intervention, the guards released Moreton.

“Come with me,” the old man said. He took Moreton’s arm in a feeble grip and began to limp off.

Moreton followed.

As they pushed through the surging crowd, which took no notice of them, busy with its own noisy bargains and prayers, pleas and denials, the old man begin to talk, addressing Moreton as if they had known each other all their lives.

“Its not too late to go back, you know. You haven’t taken enough steps along the Great Road to commit yourself. It has no hold on you yet. You’re still between worlds. Just run right through the gate, and behold—you’re back in the old safe place you know.”

The weathered face of the stranger regarded him earnestly, with a trace of humor in it. Moreton found his features familiar, yet unplaceable.

“No,” Moreton said. “No. I don’t believe I can.”

Letting go of Moreton’s sleeve, the old man clapped his hands. “Splendid. Then we’ll go on. I’ll accompany you for as long as you wish.”

Moreton found the thought curiously comforting.

As they walked, his new companion continued to talk.

“Of course, this is the Great Road. I suspect you already knew something of the sort. As a matter of convenience, we can say that it begins at the gate—although of course, as you saw, it extends beyond, through the desert. But that part does not matter. One might as well try to fathom what existed before time began. What counts is this fine expanse of dusty cobbles down which we now saunter. The Great Road. Common thoroughfare of the high and the low, the mighty and the powerless, the happy and the dejected, the serene and the tortured, the blessed and the damned. And don’t make the common mistake of assuming that the former term of each set matches up with all the others—nor necessarily do the latter ones. That is one thing the Great Road will teach you from the outset.”

Moreton drew his fascinated gaze away from the haggling and eating, the laboring and conversing going on all around him. “How long does it go on?”

The old man’s wrinkled face cracked in a smile that revealed gaps in his teeth. “Longer than you will ever see. No man has ever walked the whole length of the Great Road. You will not be the first to succeed, either. The Great Road is longer than your life. But for those who have once trodden it, there is nothing else.”

Moreton felt warm inside. It was what he had wanted to hear.

“Don’t get self-satisfied,” the old man warned, his quavery voice suddenly sharp. “Life is still life here. You can suffer and die before your time, be entrapped and frustrated. Wisdom will elude you, unless you are persistent.”

“I will be,” Moreton promised. “Let’s walk a little faster now.”

* * *

His first pair of shoes had worn out long ago. They had been replaced by a pair of ox-hide sandals that had lasted almost a year. After the sandals became more strap than sole, he had bartered a day’s work for a pair of curve-toed slippers like his companion’s. They were surprisingly durable and comfortable, and he felt elegant in them.

His original clothing had lasted a bit longer than the shoes. Piece by piece, though, it had worn away, fraying at elbow and knee, seams unraveling and threads falling away like his old life. Now he favored a simple white robe like his friend’s.

He felt he could truly call John his friend. (He had been surprised to learn the old man bore his name, but after a while it had seemed only right.) He and the old man had talked incessantly at first, as each new sight and custom demanded an explanation. Now, their common silences were as evocative as words, and he could not imagine being without John.

They never stopped for long on the Great Road. Only long enough to barter their labor for food and clothing. Even when they slept, it was only for a few hours in the shade of an awning, or wrapped in a borrowed blanket against a wall that cut the night wind. (Luckily, this land seemed innocent of winter.) Then it was off again, in search of new wonders, new people, new experiences.

And the things Moreton had seen! The Great Road was endlessly prolific of invention.

There had been the miles of crumbling slums, where the people ate rats big as cats—and even each other. Here, they had not dared stop, but had walked for three days and nights, their senses constantly alert.

Later, there had been the many acres extending on either side of the road that held the noisome tanneries and dye-houses. The stench here was overwhelming, but they eventually grew used to it, and the clean air farther on seemed like an aberration.

A subsequent stretch of the Great Road—as if deliberately planned for contrast—held enormous mansions, each vying to outdo the others in the splendor of their facades and estates and servants.

Beyond the grand promenade, one huge, shedlike structure occupied a whole mile by itself. John told Moreton it was a rope-walk, where thin strands of hemp were twisted by stages into enormous hawsers to anchor the caravels they later saw when the Great Road ran parallel to the sea.

Elsewhere, among the miles of fruit and vegetables and live squawking chickens, they enjoyed heartier-than-normal fare for free, thanks to the generosity of the vendors, who were glad to be rid of their bruised produce. Not having to work for their supper allowed them to cover the leagues even faster.

The people Moreton and his guide encountered were intrinsically more fascinating than the places, if that were possible. The depths of the human spirit Moreton plumbed astonished him, as did the heights. He met rogues and whores, cowards and heroes, the passionate and the apathetic, the generous and the miserly.

One man told Moreton how his best friend had betrayed him in business, and how he had later held the mans life in his hands—only to have a shipwreck sunder them before he could decide on mercy or revenge. The incomplete test of his nature had troubled him ever since.

A blind beggar told how he had given his eyes to see a goddess, and found her not what he had hoped for.

A lofty gentlewoman broke down crying and confessed—when Moreton idly mentioned the vast slumlands—how she had been born there and advanced to her present position by ruthless deceit and treachery.

Never once did Moreton miss the world he had left behind, the secondhand experiences captured crudely—and always ultimately unsatisfyingly —in black marks on white pages, like the footprints made by an ignorant, blundering giant on a field of virgin snow.

The experience of traversing the Great Road seemed to agree with the old man as well. Each day on the road left him a little sprier and less aged than the day before, his face less wrinkled, his gait more steady.

Conversely, Moreton seemed to age as he would have in the old world, no faster, but no slower, either.

Then came the year when Moreton and John appeared the same age. Moreton thought little of it. It was the same year he met Samara.

She was a fish-peddler’s daughter, sitting patiently by her stern-faced father at his stand each day. Her hands were chapped, but her face was fresh as the dawn at the eastern end of the Great Road. Her eyes were amber, like the rare wine Moreton had sampled many miles ago. Beneath her thin purple robe, her supple body beckoned Moreton like the road itself.

Moreton fell in love with her as she weighed his purchase. He turned to his companion, the old man no longer old.

“We will stay here a time,” Moreton said.

John said nothing.

Moreton lived with Samara for three years, lovers in the easy way dictated by the customs of the land around them. John he saw infrequently—he could not even say where his ex-guide lived—and then only to talk of inconsequentials. The man seemed to be aging again, away from the vitality of the road.

One day John asked, “Do you miss the road? Don’t you wonder what lies beyond the narrow confines of your bedroom?”

Moreton replied, “No. I have Samara.” But a seed of doubt had been planted.

Eighteen months later, on a moonless night, Moreton slipped out of his house, leaving Samara sleeping with their two children. He headed down the Great Road, toward where he had never been.

After some distance, he found he had a shadow.

John said, “It is good to be moving again.”

* * *

Moreton sat still, his old bones aching. He tried to remember all he had seen and lived, but there was too much. Each breath he had drawn had been suffused with miracles. There was no moment of his life that had not been full of a fierce pleasure, not one moment he regretted. Even those times when he had been forced to kill to survive seemed resplendent with a kind of ineffable glory.

How many miles had he and John walked? The total seemed incalculable. Each foot of the Great Road held its own world, for as deep back as one chose to explore. Temples and gambling dens, quiet family firesides and raucous taverns, strange tribes and queer sects.

At times, he had grown weary of the bottomless mystery, the weight and burden of the lives of others. But always he found new resources within himself to meet the challenge of sharing their joy and despair. Despite all he had seen over the decades, he knew there was still more to astonish and delight him, and he longed to encounter it.

But now he was old—too old to continue. Each morning he could barely rise from his hard bed of cobbles. The swift pace he had maintained for years was beyond him now.

With John, it was different.

John was a young man now. His face was totally unlined, his limbs straight, his voice resonant. When Moreton thought of it at all, he found nothing unfair in the situation. After all, Moreton had been young when John was old. Now he was old, and John young. And of course, John aided Moreton daily, lending a strong shoulder or arm. At last, though, even his comradeship and strength had not been enough to allow Moreton to continue.

One day, in the shade of a coffee shops gaily striped awning, Moreton tried to recover enough strength to continue their journey. The task was hopeless, though, and John seemed to sense as much.

“Have you seen enough of the Great Road at last?” John asked.

“No,” Moreton managed to say. “I would go on. Is it possible?”

John smiled. “Not with me, my friend. But perhaps—if you are as lucky as I was—with another.”

John laid a hand on Moreton’s brow. Moreton closed his eyes gratefully at the cool pressure.

“Good-bye,” John said. “And thank you.” Then Moreton felt his companion’s hand fade away.

When Moreton opened his eyes, he saw that not John had moved, but he himself. The sun now beat down hotly on his unprotected head. He realized with wonder that he lay within sight of the gate, where he had stood so long ago for the first time upon the road. Two guards identical to those who had accosted him so many years ago flanked the arch. The desert quivered with heat beyond.